Unlock Your Past and Power

Coming in to Train 4 The Game in September of 2009, my training style reflected a mixture of my past: football, lacrosse, rugby, Crossfit, Olympic lifting, rock climbing, and yoga.  My training being fractious, I had no cohesive view of how to incorporate all the requisite movements and motions of my past into one training system.  I was not looking for a synthesis as to somehow incorporate all these sports' movements into one meta-sport training system -- Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Baseketball does this so beautifully, I would not dare to encroach upon their sport-blending genius -- so much as to seek a way to train all the different movement patterns accumulated over the span of my life.  And, most importantly, I needed a way to stay healthy and prevent injuries while doing so.

As my internship began, light bulb after light bulb set off in my head as connections were both created and severed as I more clearly defined my idea of "functional fitness."    Always interested in training my body most efficiently, one rule immediately stood out to me as seminal: train the movements that you perform.  For myself, I began using a weighted bar as a lacrosse stick -- working on acceleration and deceleration to improve agility on the field.  For some of our clients, this is simply evaluating gait patterns (how one walks) and coaching their movements to become more efficient in walking.  For other clients, we may focus on a pivot step that creates an especially vulnerable position for football players' ACL.  In doing so, we provide a training platform where athletes and clients are well-prepared for the precarious situations they may face in competition and life.  In summary, we train the body not as many isolated segments--wherein the muscles and bones are essentially treated as inert objects--but as one huge chain reaction, all connected by sheets of fibrous connective tissue called fascia.

Viewing the body in such a way truly unlocks the past:  the T4TG evaluation and training processes elicit information regarding past injuries, compensations, and limiting factors.  This is not to say that a complete record of one's physical past can be enumerated from the evaluation; however, it builds the foundation for success.  From this foundation moving into the actual training, the exercise is the test and the test is the exercise.  That is, the initial performance evaluation is not all-inclusive or the be all, end all.  Being mindful of such an aphorism, our movement coaches are constantly assessing and evaluating athlete/client performance, and the workouts are designed to simultaneously increase performance, remove pain, and prevent further injuries.

Upon training with T4TG, I unlocked the past of my football, lacrosse, and rugby days: an extremely tight and immobile thoracic spine.  As a result, I unlocked much formerly inaccessible power, removed lower back pain, and formed a cohesive view of what makes fitness at T4TG functional.  Unlock your past and power with Train 4 The Game.